Kurt Baumeister
Kurt Baumeister is the author of Pax Americanas. His writing has appeared in Salon, Guernica, Electric Literature, and other outlets. Baumeister is an editor with 7.13 Books in Brooklyn. His forthcoming novel is Twilight of the Gods. Find him on the Internet at kurtbaumeister.com.
Mark Doten's Trump Sky Alpha
By Kurt BaumeisterHumanity has a sort of love affair with lists.
Leland Cheuk's No Good Very Bad Asian
By Kurt BaumeisterLeland Cheuk does an admirable job in his latest, No Good Very Bad Asian, achieving a true synthesis of heart and humor highlighted by the fluidity of his first-person voice and a steady diet of sharp turns of prose.
The Once and Future Queen: Amber Sparks's Weird Realism
By Kurt BaumeisterAmber Sparks’s third story collection And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges is, as the title suggests, teeming with tales of retribution, though reducing the book or even its concept to that of a glorified burn book would be way off the mark. Desire, anger, murder, madness, robots, gods, monsters, apocalypses, love, hate, violence, magic, fairy godmothers, women as heroes, and men behaving badly (badly-behaved men who often pay with their lives, or hearts, or souls for said bad behavior): all these things live within this book’s pages.
In Conversation
Sequoia Nagamatsu with Kurt Baumeister
Sequoia Nagamatsu’s first novel, How High We Go in the Dark, could be called a deft fusion of science fiction and contemporary dramatic realism, but that wouldn’t fully capture the achievement this novel represents.
Matt Bell’s Appleseed
By Kurt BaumeisterYes, this is climate fiction at its core—a sci-fi sub-genre that seems to be everywhere at this moment—but there’s an unabashed earnestness to Appleseed, a love even, for the natural world, that combines with Bell’s lush prose to make this book much more than simple cli-fi, to turn it into a sort of love song for our dying world. Like any good love song, Appleseed is part, or perhaps even mostly, tragedy.
In Conversation
Tobias Carroll with Kurt Baumeister
By Kurt BaumeisterTobias Carroll is a seemingly tireless advocate for the work of others. In addition to his role as Managing Editor at Vol. 1 Brooklyn he pens the Words Without Borders’ Watchlist column and has contributed fiction, nonfiction, reviews, and criticism to Tin House, Rolling Stone, Hazlitt, The Scofield, Bookforum, and others. His books include the short story collection Transitory (Civil Coping Mechanisms), the novel Reel (Rare Bird), Political Sign (Bloomsbury), and the forthcoming novel Ex-Members from Astrophil Press (June 15).
